Rainbow Infrastruggles of LGBTQ2S Imaginaries: Surplus Spatial Aesthetics of Suburban Sexuality

Keywords: Suburbs, infrastructure, LGBTQ2S, visibility politics, social inclusion
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 27

Abstract

How are LGBTQ2S imaginaries embedded in the heteronormative infrastructural aesthetics of contemporary suburbanization? The mundane materialities of the techno-production of suburban infrastructure provision -- historically focused on ordering space and subjects through the controlled reproduction of heterosexual nuclear families within land development approval processes -- evacuates responsibility for social inclusion as a political ideal to address growing demographic diversity and exclusion. On the periphery of Canada’s major city-regions, the purported neutrality and ‘simple presence’ of suburban infrastructure is questioned through LGBTQ2S activism that reconfigures its images and representations within municipal governance frameworks. Using examples of rainbow ‘infrastruggles’ from two peripheral municipalities in the Vancouver city-region, Burnaby and Surrey, the paper focuses on conflicts surrounding the installation of civic crosswalks, flag raising protocols, and city hall plaza lighting. It argues that the municipal deployment of a ‘rainbow’ visibility politics in the artifacts of suburban infrastructure produces what is perceived as ‘surplus visibility’, resulting in local morality contests over what is excessive representation and who can have a legitimate presence in the aestheticized landscape. New to suburbia, rainbow visibility is infrastruggle because it challenges homonegative governance erasure and conservative constituency defense of the suburban commons through vandalism, protest, and exceptionalism. LGBTQ2S surplus visibility through representation, then, is a reparative practice used in the face of past infrastructural failures, but in its aestheticization of inclusion, it superficially absolves municipalities of their relative inattention and inaction in more substantive plans and policies for LGBTQ2S inclusion.